Amy Wlodarski '97, music historian, choir director

Amy Wlodarski’s first experiences with a liberal arts approach to music history occurred at Middlebury College, where she pursued a double degree in music performance (voice) and modern history. There, she merged her interests in German history with her extensive performance background in a senior thesis that explored Jewish music-making during the Third Reich, for which she earned the annual history prize at Middlebury in 1997. After several years pursuing a performance career, Professor Wlodarski returned to her love of history and pursued a doctorate in musicology at the Eastman School of Music.

Prof. Wlodarski holds degrees in musicology from Eastman, where she continued her study of the problematic relationship between music and politics and authored a dissertation that explored the manner in which German composers musically represented the Holocaust in the post-WWII period. Her work tends to focus on the manner in which memory influences musical composition and reception, especially in musical memorials and political works.

As a musicologist, Prof. Wlodarski has presented several professional papers on the interaction of memory and music in the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Rudolph Wagner-Regeny, Boris Blacher, Hans Krasa, and Viktor Ullmann. She has also published articles on the manner in which political memory influences contemporary performance practice, especially with regard to music from the Holocaust Ghetto Terezin (Theresienstadt) and postwar Holocaust memorial songs. She is also the recipient of several grants, including a Fulbright Scholarship, a Presser Music Foundation Award, and the Elsa T. Johnson Award.

Prof. Wlodarski also serves as the director of the College Choir, a 70-100 mixed-voice ensemble that performs significant choral repertory from the post-1750 era. In addition to her performance experience, Prof. Wlodarski has also served as a guest instructor at the Eton College Summer Choral Courses (United Kingdom) and as director of the Middlebury College Women’s Choir from 1997-99. During her tenure at Eastman, she studied conducting with James Ripley and sang in several professional choirs.

In the fall of 2009 She presented a paper on Steve Reich's Different Trains at the AMS national conference in Quebec City.

Dr. Wlodarski was recently granted tenure at Dickinson University and she also received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor given to a Dickinson faculty member.